In this blog series, we focus on Procure to Pay (P2P) documents that large enterprises process in the P2P process. Next-generation Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) enables the automated processing of the most common P2P documents and the delivery of structured data, allowing large enterprises to significantly increase the efficiency of their accounts payable processes.
The purchase order is probably the most important document in the P2P process (or from an accounts payable perspective, the invoice). In order for a large enterprise to be able to order, it obviously first needs different offers from different suppliers. While some of the suppliers are connected to the large enterprise via direct interfaces, there is still a part that sends their offers as PDFs via e-mail or even by mail.
If this is the case, employees in the P2P process cannot avoid manually entering the offers and reconciling them. At least not if large companies do not consider intelligent automation solutions such as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) for capturing and processing the offers.
In the second part of the P2P blog series, we discussed automated invoice processing in large enterprises.
Entering offers manually = time-consuming & costly
A client or production order is received by the large enterprise. Now requests have to be sent out to suppliers to get offers from suppliers who are not directly connected to the large enterprise. In this way, different offers based on priorities such as:
- prices
- delivery dates
- etc.
can be compared, the desired supplier with the best conditions can be selected and the purchase order can be created.
The problem with this is that getting offers in from suppliers and then matching them against each other is not only a tedious and repetitive task for employees, but also extremely time consuming and costly. Not what large companies want in a modern P2P process today. And not what is actually possible with relatively little financial and time effort. We are talking about Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) for the automatic capture, processing and matching of incoming offers.
With IDP: Automatically read and match offers
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) makes exactly that possible in the P2P process of large enterprises. Instead of manual capture and matching, the motto is automation.
As can be seen in the photo of the IDP platform, all relevant data is read from the offers. This also applies to completely unstructured and handwritten documents. In addition to the header data, all line item data is automatically read out as follows:
Line item data: Article, description, supplier article number, customer article number, unit, quantity, price/unit, discount, total amount, etc.
With the structured data from the various offers, large enterprises can now, also automatically, compare the offers in the ERP system with each other. This means that the best supplier can be identified and the purchase order created within a very short time.
Customize P2P document types within minutes
To give large enterprises full flexibility, P2P documents can be easily customized to meet their own needs. By deleting or adding fields, they can be customized. With the user-friendly, no-code IDP platform, large enterprises can also create their own document types in no time at all.
In part 4 of the P2P blog series, we delve into automated capture and processing of order confirmations with Intelligent Document Processing.
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